The admissions to the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) have been mired by large-scale merit violations and tech glitches this year.

The admissions to the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) have been mired by large-scale merit violations and tech glitches this year.

After ‘false’ seat allotments to more than one lakh students due to tech glitch, the admission body had to roll back its second upgradation list on Monday after large scale merit violations surfaced.

The counseling for NIT seats is being done by the Central Seat Allocation Board (CSAB). There are nearly 20,000 seats for 30 NITs.

“Yes we have noticed large-scale merit violations and have therefore decided to roll back the second upgradation list announced on Monday. We have also decided to have a third round of seat allotment. We had actually not anticipated the degree to which merit violations could happen,” Prof Sunil Kr Sarangi, chairman, CSAB 2013, said.

The violations happened since an upgradation of seats was done to minimise vacancies, but in the process, some got advantage over others, he said.

Earlier, more than one lakh students were on July 18 ‘wrongly’ allotted mechanical engineering branch at NIT Patna against the 93 seats actually available.

The error was noticed in an hour and corrected. Soon after, the chairman tendered an apology on the official website for the faulty allotments. This was the second apology letter. The first came after the first round of counselling where a tech glitch changed the institute and seats allotted to the students.

Admitting that errors had occurred during NIT counseling, Sarangi said: “Till last year, we were taking computer support from the NIC. This year to reduce vacancies, there was a plan to have a common counselling for IIT and NIT with computational support of CDAC.”